Digital oratory skills have become essential for academic and professional success in today’s digital world, making it imperative to integrate digital oratory training into public speaking pedagogy. This study examined second language (L2) speakers’ public speaking anxiety and nonverbal speech performance in the context of digital oratory. Participants were 40 English as a second language students enrolled in a public speaking course at a Hong Kong university. Each student recorded and uploaded an 8-minute speech to a digital learning platform. They also completed a questionnaire measuring digital oratory anxiety and participated in semi-structured interviews sharing their perceptions of digital presentation. Nonverbal speech performance was assessed, and correlations with digital oratory anxiety were analyzed. The results showed that cognitive and physiological factors had a greater influence on digital oratory anxiety than behavioral and technical factors. Although no significant correlations were found between digital oratory anxiety and nonverbal speech performances, the technical factor had the least impact on L2 students’ anxiety, leading to positive outcomes regarding the technical quality of the speech videos. Comparatively, eye contact and gestures attained much lower mean scores than voice control and facial expressions. Interview results further elucidated the benefits and challenges students experienced during digital presentations. Pedagogically, the findings highlight the need of a holistic approach considering cognitive, physiological, behavioral, and technical factors to address L2 learners’ digital oratory anxiety. Given its affordability and accessibility, digital oratory can be effectively integrated into instruction to develop L2 students’ multimodal communication and nonverbal delivery skills.

On April 28, 2025, a large-scale blackout affected mainland Spain and Portugal for over ten hours, severely impacting Emergency Medical Services (EMS). Although the cause remains uncertain and initially cyberattack was a concern, it has most probably been related to infrastructure failure. This event exposed critical vulnerabilities in EMS preparedness, as no region had a specific contingency plan for power outages.

The blackout led to wide-spread disruption, including traffic signal failures that caused accidents and delayed emergency response, and the collapse of communication networks that affected 1-1-2 emergency calls. Fuel shortages also emerged as gas stations became non-operational. Patients using home medical devices faced life-threatening situations, with at least one death reported due to a ventilator failure. The reliance on technology proved to be a major weakness, as many EMS systems lacked backup communication tools like satellite phones or analog radios, and many hospitals and ambulance bases were not prepared with stable generators and adequate fuel access.

Coordination between EMS, hospitals, and other emergency services was challenged by incompatible protocols and equipment. Despite these difficulties, EMS demonstrated adaptability by prioritizing urgent care and reallocating resources. The event exposed systemic fragilities and underscored the need for robust emergency planning, interagency drills, technological redundancy, and investment in resilient infrastructure. This incident serves as a global wake-up call, emphasizing that health systems must be prepared for increasing risks from climate change, cyber threats, and energy insecurity. Emergency preparedness should shift from being reactive to proactive, focusing on flexible systems, coordinated action, and workforce training to ensure continuity of health care during future blackouts.

Taylor Swift has dreamt of two things: fame and success, and a quiet life with someone she loves. She dreams of making it and of escaping it. The problem is that these dreams seem to conflict. Achieving one can feel like giving up on the other. Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, finds both dreams well represented. She wants immortality and a basketball hoop in the driveway. She also has a new insight for reconciling them. Happiness can be made, she tells us. And if you make it with another person, you might be able to live two dreams that once felt impossible to fit together.

The Pelagatos volcano is situated within the Sierra Chichinautzin Volcanic Field (SCVF), 20 km southeast of Mexico City. Previous radiocarbon (14C) dating has revealed that the age of the Pelagatos volcano ranges from 2.5 ± 0.1 to 14.1 ± 0.2 ka BP (1σ). The analysis of additional cosmogenic radionuclides, such as in situ 10Be, facilitates the confirmation of the geochronology of any geological phenomenon by determining exposure ages in quartz minerals. This study proposes a new chronology for the exposure of the Pelagatos volcano rocks by in situ analysis of 10Be in olivine samples collected from five locations. The average 10Be ages in olivine from Pelagatos rocks range from 3.95 ± 0.97 ka to 5.7 ± 1.4 ka (1σ), with a mean age of 4.6 ± 0.9 ka and 4.9 ± 0.9 ka for flow 1 and flow 2, respectively. These results are consistent with previously reported 14C ages, confirming the reliability of the 10Be exposure ages obtained in this study. The in situ dating of 10Be in olivine minerals presents a viable alternative for elucidating the volcanic history and estimating the timing of the next eruption in this volcanic field.

The study of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America during the colonial era has long been a central pillar in the historiography of Latin America. This essay, a contribution to the TAM Vault series, provides an overview of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory through a quantitative and qualitative study of relevant articles and book reviews published in The Americas. My primary goal in writing this essay is to demonstrate how increased attention to Indigenous-language sources, beginning in the 1990s, has transformed the writing of colonial history in Mexico and Central America. By tracking data from relevant publications and analyzing the debates and discussions featured in the journal, I construct a chronological historiography of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory from 1944 through 2019.

Second-order beliefs – what political actors think others think – can shape agenda-setting and even shift public opinion. Because of the collective-action nature of mitigating human-caused climate change, such second-order political beliefs are particularly important to study. Through an innovative survey design focusing on a policy proposal to introduce meat-free days in canteens, we present the first simultaneous comparison of ordinary citizens’, locally elected political representatives’, and centrally employed public administrators’ own opinions and their ability to accurately identify the majority position of citizens. While citizens are split in their opinion on meat-free days in canteens, a clear majority of unelected elites support it, and most elected elites do not support this policy. Nonetheless, we find that all three groups tend to underestimate the level of policy support among citizens. Through rigorous analysis, we show that elected elites are significantly more likely to underestimate public support for a meat-free day compared to citizens and unelected elites. These results provide important insights into the dynamics of democratic governance and suggest that underestimation of citizens’ support for climate policies may further complicate an already challenging policy area.

We study a continuous-time mutually catalytic branching model on the $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$. The model describes the behavior of two different populations of particles, performing random walk on the lattice in the presence of branching, that is, each particle dies at a certain rate and is replaced by a random number of offspring. The branching rate of a particle in one population is proportional to the number of particles of another population at the same site. We study the long time behavior for this model, in particular, coexistence and noncoexistence of two populations in the long run. Finally, we construct a sequence of renormalized processes and use duality techniques to investigate its limiting behavior.